Critical Speaker Series – Ronjaunee Chatterjee Graduate Student Seminar

The Critical Speaker Series and A19, UNC’s first 19th-century studies organization, are thrilled to welcome Ronjaunee Chatterjee of Queen’s University for a public lecture and graduate student seminar. Dr. Chatterjee is a scholar of the nineteenth century with expertise in poetry and the novel. She researches theoretical and philosophical approaches to literature, specifically those developed from within queer and feminist theory, critical race and decolonial theory, psychonanalysis, and continental philosophy. Her first book, “Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature” (Stanford University Press, 2022), argues that there are figurations of the feminine across literary genres in the nineteenth century that are not accessible through the frameworks of liberal individualism. She offers the term singularity instead to describe a model of subjecthood grounded in what is partial, contingent, and in relation, rather than what is merely “alone.” She is the editor of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (A Norton Critical Edition, expected 2023). She has also co-edited a special issue of Victorian Studies (with Alicia Mireles Christoff and Amy R. Wong, 2020) and cowritten an introductory essay entitled “Undisciplining Victorian Studies” which won the NAVSA Donald Gray Prize for Best Essay in Victorian Studies.